Richard Denniss charge predictable

It’s alarming how willingly think tanks surrender any claim to objectivity by revealing their hand. A simple phrase like Richard Dennis’s “tiny carbon price" is enough to give the game away (‘When policy lacks nuance’, Opinion, October 16).

It’s evidence that Denniss might suffer from the tendency to mix up what he should believe with what he wants to believe. The fact that Australia has made good money out of selling coal and iron ore to China is not inherently contradictory; a free market doesn’t distinguish between whether the consumer is communist, capitalist, or a bit of both. There’s no doubt that the Australian economy has reaped the rewards of the unbalanced liberalisation of the Chinese economy, primarily in its over-investment in infrastructure. And it’s true that the present problems are due to the inevitable rebalancing.

But Australia clearly stands to prosper from rising domestic consumption in the massive Chinese market over the long term. That’s hardly an indictment of the free market, but Dennis, having miraculously landed exactly where he wants to, grabs his tattered standard and leads the tired old charge for greater government intervention.